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Evernote for Mac Update: Card View, Word Count, New Save Features, and More

Posted by Andrew Sinkov on 08 May 2012

Posted by Andrew Sinkov on 08 May 2012

Editor’s Note: As of April 29, 2015, the Evernote features and pricing described in this blog post have changed. Please reference our comparison page for a current list of features and pricing levels.

Today, Evernote for Mac gets a pretty great update (v 3.1) full of new features, redesigned screens and stability improvements. We’ve added a completely new Card View, word and character counts for notes, easier attachment export, and much more. Let’s take a look:

The New Card View

We replaced our thumbnail view with a completely new Card View. The design of this view will be familiar to Evernote for iPad users and those that have tried using Evernote for Mac in fullscreen mode.

There are several reasons to love Card View. First, you get much more information about the content of the note at a glance. If your note contains only text, then you’ll see the first couple of sentences in the card. If it’s just an image, then the card will present a well-formatted thumbnail.

The Card View action bar
At the top of the Card View, there are several useful options. At left, you can select a sorting method. In the middle, choose from one of two card sizes. On the right, choose to hide the note pane and expand Card View. You should definitely try that last one. Hide the note pane and also hide the left notebook panel using the Favorites Bar. The result: a full app window of note cards, which is a great new way to browse your notes.

Word and character count!

You asked for it, and here it is. Evernote for Mac now has word and character count totals for each note. To view the counts, tap on the “i” in the top right corner of a note. The numbers are displayed in the Size section. To view the counts quickly, try the CMD+Shift+I keyboard shortcut.

Redesigned account info screen

We spruced up the account info screen inside the app to make it easier to read important information, such as your remaining monthly allowance (60MB for Free users and 1GB for Premium). Also, Free users can now upgrade to Premium by clicking a new upgrade button in the account info screen.

Save all attachments

Dragging something out of a note onto your desktop is simple enough when you only want one file, but what if you want to export all the files and attachments in a note? Now, we have the answer. Click on a note, or select multiple notes, then right click and choose Save Attachments. You’ll be asked to choose a destination folder. That’s all. Every file, image, PDF, and audio clip are now in that folder. This is just one of the many ways that we make it easy for you get your content out of Evernote.

Better printing

You’ve asked us to add more context to notes that you print and, in this update, we did. In the print settings, click on Show Details. Next, click the checkbox labeled Print Headers. Now, your notes will print with all their header information, including title, dates, tags, and notebook.

Date and time stamp

We’ve added a couple of useful keyboard shortcuts that let you add a quick date and time into the body of a note as you type.

For date: Press CMD+Shift+D

For time: Press CMD+Shift+Option+D

These shortcuts are great if you’re taking accurate meeting minutes or trying to associate your lecture audio recording with the notes you’ve taken. If you’d like to change the date formatting, you can set it in the new Formatting tab in Evernote Settings.

And much more…

In addition to all of these great new capabilities, we also improved bullets and numbered lists, made result highlighting in PDFs more accurate, and fixed tons of other issues. You’ll find the app is more stable and reliable than ever. We hope you like our latest version of Evernote for Mac. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Nice updates but where is a Due Date field – one little date field that many of us have been begging for years…. Pretty please?

Judd—

What a week for updates, eh? Thanks for all the work. Love the Mac update. One question: if you are in card view and have the reading pannel open, should the note resize itself automatically to fit the width of the reading pane?

victor—

This Card View is very SUCKS!
Very bad looking

Rich—

Looks great – I like card view – would love to be able to sort by tags in all views though.

Danny H.—

For a future update, I’m hoping to see line spacing as an option under Format.

Right now, if I want to change the line spacing in a note, I have to copy and paste the note into Microsoft Word, change it and copy-paste back. 🙂 Is this on your list?

In general, I love using Evernote; thanks for making such a useful product!

Lukas—

Loving the word count. I have had to cut and paste into a document editor just to get word counts lately for Uni. Thanks for the addition.

Jason K—

I’ve been an Evernote user on Mac since 2008 and have really loved every update to Evernote except this one. I really hate the Card View. I use thumbnail view in order to see the picture of the content of the note. Thumbnail view provides a clean representation of the content of the note and is especially valuable if you have a photo or other image without text. Before you could adjust the size of the thumbnails. With Card View you are stuck with the same size card. On a larger monitor you get an endless display of cards. The headings clutter up the notes and I find it very hard to quickly find what I’m looking for. Why wouldn’t you have just added Card View as an additional view option instead of removing thumbnail view altogether? I don’t understand the need to replicate the tablet interface (Card View is on the iPad) within a desktop or laptop viewing environment?

Kathy—

I love the card view – makes working in full screen a pleasure. Thanks!

Belinda—

OMG word count. Thank you!

JayMonster—

Please, leave that hot mess on Mac, and don’t screw up you Windows and Web clients with this as well.

Did you happen to notice the burst of new and returning users you got about a month ago when one of your competitors (Springpad), unleashed this Pinterest clone look on its users? Don’t fall into the same trap! Evernote is too powerful for the average Pinterest user, and Pinterest is too unwieldy and pointless to the average Evernote user. Try to straddle that line and you wind up with a product that lots of people try, but few stick with because it winds up meeting nobody’s needs.

Yes, Evernote is long past due for an improved UI, but that doesn’t mean going after the lowest common denominator.

Walid Damouny—

I understand your lack of excitement for the new cards view. It is not a power-user feature in particular, but I still find it useful myself. I am very visually oriented and remember things by their looks a lot more than by textual descriptions. Having the card view on Windows will be great for me although I wouldn’t mind it being an option rather than the default. I’ll turn it on myself.

Bob—

I concur that the “card view” is a step backward. Way back. The thumbnail view was very dynamic, changing perspective resulted in smooth animated movement that helped to clarify the spacial relationship between notes. That is gone. The same effect was very pleasant when searching, you were able to see the notes smoothly rearrange themselves while your search parameters were resolving themselves, by the time you finished typing the full search term you had a clean, organized thumbnail view of applicable notes. Always thought Mac version was more user friendly than the PC version, certainly not the case with this update. To summarize; ouch!

Daniele—

Thanks for the updates. It looks good so far.

However, could you please consider adding an export as PDF option in the future? I have some things in notes that I need to send to friends and clients, and I also like to protect those files, so, right now i have to copy & paste into another word editing app, save and secure. If the Evernote team added that option it would make things so much easier.

Rahul Khanna—

Must admit I prefer the snippets view too – please don’t remove it as an option on the PC version (although I look forward to the other features moving to PC 🙂 )

The thumbnails work well on my android tablet but it’s not a view that sits well with the Desktop ethos of functionality and mouse-keyboard operation.

Kylea—

I’m going to phrase this as positively as possible… one of THE best things about Evernote was the old thumbnail view, which allowed you to quickly see and visually recognise your documents. It made sorting and navigate around documents so easy. This new Card View completely takes that away. The titles are very distracting and you can’t easily see the document. It is now basically like having a standard computer folder with files in it, and all you can see are the file names and no content. I was so happy when I first found Evernote, and now feel like one of the best features has been taken away. Any chance of an update which will give the old view as an option? Please please please, I need Evernote back!

José Guillén—

The fullscreen view was useless for me before this update, but now the card view works incredible for me. Great work!

Robb—

Thanks Evernote Staff for working incredible hard to make organizing our lives easier. Update is awesome. Just a quick comment: We would be stoked to be able to sort by tags & change the created date — much like the ‘privileged’ Windows users. It allows us to sort/find things much easier. Thanks so much! Viva la Evernote!

Alexander—

Are you planning an Evernote for Windows redesign?
Cause compared… Windows version looks quite obsolete.

Marianne—

I love the card view. Very helpful. Thanks.

Alan J. Ostrowe, M.D.—

I have the pre-app store version 3.0.6 premium level. How do I get the upgrade? that is without having to repurchase the app?

Tom Funk—

I really like the new update to the Mac version. There is one small change I would like to see in future and that is the ability to highlight text in a note. It is possible now to change color and size, but being able to highlight in yellow or whatever would allow users to find things more quickly. I can do it now by importing a highlighted word into a note and then copying this to highlight other text, but it would be easier just to have this feature added.

C. Scot Giles—

I’m very pleased with this update. I especially like the different views that are now available in full screen mode. As a MacBook Air user, it’s really helpful to set up different desktops for always-open applications and to easily see what is on a desktop because it’s running in full screen mode. The other new features are also great. EN continues to be a superb program and keeps getting better.

Reinard Schmitz—

I hate this cardview! It is absolutely useless and takes a lot of room on the screen. Even on the iPad it’s a mess. All developers seem to think that people want this card view. Will not install the update.

Reinard Schmitz—

Hate this card view, please let us choose to use it! I will not update to this version. Same problem in Skye, in Twitter, in… Who had this great idea???

M—

OMG, wholeheartedly agree with the comments above, “card view” should have been added as an optional view, instead of replacing a thumbnail view. You just assumed that every user uses Evernote the same way. I use evernote to gather visual inspiration, and with this new view, my screengrabs are way too small now when looking at thumb view, and the one line of text I put above them has the same weight as the humongous image that I actually want to see when thumbing through. I sure hope I can downgrade from this version, and will be cautious in the future of any new updates. Please bring back the thumbnail view, this program is unusable without it.

Chris—

Please bring back snippet view. At least leave it as an option. I don’t like the card view on the iPad and I don’t like it on the Mac. Otherwise great product!

vv—

Contrary to some of the comments above, I LOVE the card view! Loading fast and beautifully.
Thanks for adding the time stamp feature, very useful for keeping a work log.

My most-needed feature is a easier way to _search by title only_. Having to type “intitle:” each time when I try to locate a file is quite a task. Proposed solution: a richer search button like the one in the mekentosj papers – you simply hit the button and choose “search title”, and done. Or a simpler way of phrasing, such as “ti:” instead of “intitle:”. Or just any button that I can click and immediately type in.

I also think there is wasted space in the layout. I would love to compress the title, folder, tag and editing options into two rows, instead of three.
Very few people seem to be using the audio recorder and photo snapshot. (I do, but on iPhone only, not on Mac.) Can we do something to hide those unwanted buttons, and hence compress the rows?

Thanks again!

rob minnaert—

I’m quite disappointed about this update. The windows version’s had 3 or 4 updates, adding many fantastic new features, like better PDF handling, attachement renaming (my favorite) and so much more. When can we see Mac catch up?

David—

I agree with the rest of the feedback. The card view also seems very similar to the snipper view — It’s just the same summary except on a card. You should leave both views as an option. What’s wrong with giving users a choice?

Gale—

Great update! Love the card view. Evernote is helping me stay organized. Thanks for continuing to develop and improve it. You rock!

Judd—

Snippet view is still an option …

goldfilm—

How so?

Judd—

It is one of the menu options in either the tool bar or the menu bar.

danny—

Cannot wait to get the date stamp for the windows client!!!!!’!!!!
I am under the impression that you guys care more about the mac version or am I wrong?

Jeff—

Great features… would be nice to allow Press CMD+Shift+D to be used in the note title as well as the body.

jb—

when will be able to use the macOS right click’ text formatting menu items, specifically transformations’ in the evernote mac app? i like to change text to all upper case or all lower case .

Raymond Brock—

begin{rant}
Please. Please….every year I file a ticket about this. The pdf viewer in Evernote is so 1999. I’ll bet a lot of people make use of Evernote – in my case, pay for it – in order to store multiple-page pdfs. WIth the cloud it’s great to get them everywhere and onto iDevices.

But…it’s just a pdf bucket! I can’t usefully _read_ a pdf in Evernote, I’ve got to open it outside of the application in Preview. Why? Because you’ve got no notion of a pdf page! Page up and page down don’t work and nobody wants to have to use a mouse to scroll through a 50 page document. Further, try to find a word in a multi-page pdf…and you often end up at the end of the document…with all the found instances up somewhere in the body. Which…yup, you’ve got to scroll up with the mouse to find.

Why? I can’t figure it out. These pdf engines have been around forever and are incorporated into all kinds of 3rd party pdf viewers for the mac. Why would you ignore this simple thing that makes the most obviously useful feature of Evernote…so bloody obnoxious?

I really hoped that when I saw an update…that this would be it! But no. When you’re not putting your design effort into The Trunk, you’re trying to turn my computer into my iPad.

Honestly. When Devonthink finally figures out cloud syncing, I’ll have to leave Evernote for this silly reason.
end{rant}

*grump*

Brian—

I really like the multiple note selection and merge window. And big thanks for the multiple tagging function.

brett—

PLEASE consider allowing the date and time shortcuts for the title of notes as well. I tag every note in the title line with the date I enter it so I can sort by date in the title. I sometimes don’t important things until several days latter but still need to give it the date I created it. Please, please, please…it would cut down my import time by half at least.

thanks,

brett

Ali R—

I see that the update release notes say something about support for account switching but there is no mention of it here. I can’t find how to switch accounts in evernote menus, can you please help.

Trina—

As a jewelry designer and visually oriented person, I love the card view. I can see all my design ideas laid out at once and visually compare them in better detail. Would be good to keep the thumbnail version too, though, or be able to resize he cards (either way) so I can more quickly browse through all in the notebook.

Don.a.dio—

I likewise dislike the card view. The uniformity really inhibits me from finding what I need. Being able to quickly visualize the full thumbnails of photos, screenshots, texts, pdfs, etc, is the whole reason I use Evernote. Otherwise it’s just a glorified Finder.

Can there at least be the option for the old thumbnail view? I’ve downgraded since the change, which was a huge pain, and will not update until you can at least choose if you want card view or not. I have paid the yearly premium price, but may not continue if this is the direction Evernote is choosing to take.

Graham—

Nice update, it seems that every time I start EN there is a new version, great to see an app growing and improving all the time.
I look forward to similar improvements to EN for iPad.

Rich—

Highlighter option, like in iPad version, please!!! I keep going to my iPad to do this. Can work around with setting background color and then resetting text color, but it ends up being too many steps.

On the keyboard shortcut front, is it possible to migrate some shortcuts from the Mac to iPad version?

BMJT—

@Don.a.Dio, how did you downgrade to an older version? The card view is awful and I need to roll back to a previous version asap. Any help would be appreciate, thanks.

BMJT

Wilhelm Deussen—

I love the Card View as well. Loved it in fullscreen mode already.

I don’t know if this is a place for feature requests but here goes:

Could you make the “sort”-function sticky for each notebook? I have different needs for different notebooks. My invoices, for example, I want to keep sorted by date. I have collected some poems that are important to me which I’d like to keep sorted by note name. It’s just a (small) extra trouble to change the view every time I switch to another notebook.

I know my example is specific, but I can imagine that other users have similar needs.

Kristin—

I’m so bummed about the new version (3.1.1 for mac that was released yesterday). I had what I thought was a perfect workspace with my To Do list in Evernote on the right side of my screen and my email & browser & word processing on the left. I had it all lined up just perfectly, so that no matter what I was doing, I could see my To Do list in Evernote.
And then the new version was released yesterday and silly me, I upgraded with enthusiasm. As soon as it launched I discovered that I was no longer able to resize Evernote smaller than some BIG predetermined size. Its now 30% wider which means that I had to make my email & productivity SMALLER. Ugh.
What happened in this new version? Can you please make it go back so that users can choose the size of the window. Ideally we could make it as small as we wanted. I promise, if you let me customize it, I’m more likely to ALWAYS keep it open. And isnt that what you want, Evernote to be Everpresent? Please make this fix.

Trent—

Love the update.. but for the life of me I can’t see the tickbox to activate “print headers”.. it’s not listed where it says it should be? anyone else having this issue?

Trent—

Hrmmmm worked it out.. the print header option doesn’t come up if the note contains a PDF.. that sucks! 80% of my notes are PDF.

Tony—

Just to add strength to the growing disquiet…I like card view but tumbnails view was lovely and very useful also in how it worked. Can be keep it as an option? I hope so!

Sascha—

Please give me the thumbnail view back.

Kasey Fleisher Hickey—

Sascha, you can select to view your notes as thumbnails, still. Just switch the view in the upper left hand corner.

Sascha—

How should I understand your reply? In the begin of your blog article it is written:
“We replaced our thumbnail view with a completely new Card View. ” and thats what you did.
So what is the meaning of your reply?

I liked the old thumbnail view and I don’t need it to be replaced by the new card view, which stops me to find my documents by a quick look.

I would like to select the old thumbnail view, but that is not possible, because you replace it by card view instead of making it another option, what you should have done and hopefully will do now, after people told you so.

I immediately downgraded 3.1 to 3.06 after being forced into card view. (And as Don.a.dio said, me too will not continue the premium, if you force that direction.)

Dan Johnson—

Why on earth did you do away with auto-completion of tags?! OMG, I have tons of tags, and I can’t remember all of them! In addition, I was using a convention to help me with vocabulary control, for example: “this-read”, “this-do”, “this-refile”, “this-new notebook”, etc., so when I typed “this-“, I could simply select from the alternatives. Now it seems that I can’t do that any more!

Regarding the new Mac version, I do love being able to batch-update, however, the tag entry area is buggy! Probably the worst is when you type a blank as the first character of a tag, e.g. “a”, “b”, “c”, “,”, ” “, “d”, “e”, “f”, “,”, and then the “def” disappears. Or type a space following a tag and then a comma: “def ,” behaves strangely. Then there’s a mode where each letter you type into that tag field is doubled.

Another bug: go to the list of notebooks or the Snippet View and use the mouse wheel to scroll upwards. The list moves down (towards the bottom of the window) but doesn’t then spring back: it leaves fresh blank space above the list of notebooks or notes, respectively. Each time you do this, more blank space appears at the top of the list column.

Y’all have too many bugs in this release! Test the darn thing, please!

While I have your ear, the iPad version has some pretty sorry navigation. I can’t stand the “card view” there, but there seems to be no alternative! And — why on earth can’t we see notebooks in a hierarchy? All I get is a linear list of my hundred or so notebooks!

Navigating from one note to another sucks (on iPad) as does “descending” into a note and then returning to the list of notes in a notebook: I keep hitting the “back to home” button because it looks like a “back” button. Why can’t we swipe left and right on a note to navigate between them? Why is the ordering of notes so limited? (And for that matter, why is note ordering a global preference? Some notebooks are better used in chronological order, others in alphabetical!) You folks need to really re-think the entire interface of the iPad version.

That’s it for now… the list of things I dislike about your interfaces on several platforms is much longer, but those are the most annoying things. Thanks for listening…

-^-rdj-^-

Matt—

I like the idea of the card view, since I can use it as a mood-board. The problem is:
1) There’s so much dark grey gutter space between the notes, that it’s visually distracting.
2) The lines on the cards also distracts me from the content.
3) The fixed sizes also mean my content is truncated.

Ed—

The save attachments feature is great. I’m so glad that this can be done with out having an Evernote stamp on the attachment.

Staggo Lee—

I’m easy to WOW, so I really like the improvements and new features.

Michael—

How about bringing the Mac and Windows clients up to the same feature set? How hard can it be to add a “Tags” column to the Mac client!?!

Charlie B—

It’s good to have date and time stamps, but why not do this consistently on the Windows and Mac versions? In Windows, ctrl-semicolon stamps both date and time. This has been in place for years. The Mac equivalent would be cmd-semicolon, far superior to this four-fingered monstrosity.

I realize some things need to be different to accomodate the different platforms, but when possible please keep the interface consistent for the benefit of users who have multiple computers. Arbitrary keystroke combinations are hard enough to remember without needlessly having different strokes for different platforms.

PS: Trying to do a time stamp I somehow turned on the Mac’s dock hiding feature, which uses similar keys. My fault, I’m sure, but you could help by keeping it simple.

Curt—

The Card View is an interesting alternative view, but for many use cases it’s a huge step backward from the old thumbnail view. I’m interested in THE CONTENT, not the pretty ruled white paper or the grey background. The old view allowed me to zoom in and out to see the content at the level of clarity that was relevant for the task at hand. Now that feature is gone – I find myself squinting to make out the little thumbnails. The key to browsing through content in a thumbnail view is to make the content itself visually distinctive – at arm’s length, I should be able to easily differentiate one piece of content from the next. But in the new experience, each “card” looks far more alike than it does different – thus making it much harder to find what I”m looking for. Please bring back the zoomable thumbnail view!

– A Paying Evernote Premium Customer

Janet—

I wholeheartedly agree! I rarely title my screenshots and use the images to organize/find what I’m looking for rather than titles, text, or even tags. I HATE how most of my images have been cropped to fit inside these cards, their content distorted. I too am a premium user very disappointed.

Julie—

Hmm…I just ‘went Premium’ and am very unlikely to upgrade to the latest version if I’m going to be stuck with card view (also use on iPad). I find it to be clunky. It’s like going from college-lined paper to standard.

Rob Lewis—

Inexplicably, your people don’t seem to get the brilliance of my top feature request: star ratings (you know, 1 to 5 stars) for notes. iPhoto has it. iTunes has it. Lots of other apps have it. Evernote needs it.

It should of course be sortable and searchable. And “0 stars” doesn’t mean “really poor”, it means “no star rating assigned yet”.

Puh-leeeze?

Larry Clapp—

I’ve had date, time, and date+time stamping hotkeys for my Mac for quite some time, that work in all applications. Inserting these is a standard “service”, and can be configured to respond to the hotkey of your choice in the “keyboard” area of the Preferences app (I think; I’m not at my mac).

I built similar functionality, with similar hotkeys, on my work Windows box, using AutoHotkey (autohotkey.com)

That said, I look forward to the other enhancements. 🙂

Here’s the AHK code, if anyone’s interested. You’ll have to figure out the Mac bindings on your own. 🙂

When, Oh when do we get a “Tag” column? I mean, why’s this so difficult?

Victoria—

On my iMac and iPad viewing Evernote notes that are a printable 12point font are way too small to read on screen. Evernote needs to correct this issue. Providing a zoom/ in out feature would help.

amuramoto—

The best solution to this would be to open the Shared URL for the note you want to save as a PDF, then select Print in your browser, then select the built-in save as PDF option from the print menu (the availability of this varies by platform but most support saving as PDF from the print menu)

John Springer—

I’ve always though the 5 stars should be -1 (ugh), 0 (unrated), and 1,2,3 for good, better, best. That’s how I use the 1-5 in iTunes.

Guest—

I really like the multiple note selection and merge window. And big thanks for the multiple tagging function. plagiarism checker for checking plagiarism in your comments

Sameer Patel—

Is the Word Count a premium feature? I dont see it under “I”.

Elvin Reynolds—

The card view looks good, I liked the character count functionality and redesigned account info.

Cameron—

It’s great to have a word count, but it’s somewhat hard to get to on a constant basis. Not only is the mac animation super slow to open, but it’s also hidden away when ideally writers should be able to see it while they’re typing. Any chance that you’ll be including an optional toolbar at the bottom with some meta information including the word count of the document?